Writings belong of David Finnigan

All recent-like, Jordan Prosser posted a new online repository of stories and poems and fragments, under the title Jordan Doesn’t Exist, which is probably a lie, and I know because I have encountered Prosser - along with fellow film-theatre-word devil Sam Burns-Warr, Prosser is lonely theatre, whose contribution to Belconnen Theatre’s 2007 WET Season (which I curated) was The Landlords; probably the best original piece I’ve seen from a new group in a couple of years:

JC: You know what I heard once though? That the little wooden and paper umbrellas that people put in cocktails were invented before the umbrellas that people carry round in the rain.
Archie: No, they weren’t.
JC: Well, they were. First plane was made of paper.
- From The Landlords

Anyway, Jordan’s site contains but a few pieces thus far, but this chunk from ‘I think we’ve been here before‘ stood out for me for some reason. Possibly because it absolutely feels like a note addressed to the Black Mountain Tower, the hypodermic jutting out of the Cancers.

When your hair is caught by the wind here
Masses of ibis will flock to you,
Our tower will be gutting fresh meat
For you.

When your eyes take this land in
I will run like water colour,
I will run and slip and slide
Away

Past the tower,
As it caresses the plane,
We shimmy its blade
Again then fall to earth some more.

When your feet touch this floor
There’ll be cause for celebration;
They’ll kill the light grid
To spell your favourite words.

Absurd, I said.
What comes around
Comes round, I’ve found.
Leave your phones off until we reach the ground.

(My friend, he said,
Our tower gets smaller each time around.)

APD opening night

A Prisoner’s Dilemma opened tonight. It worked. Everything worked. It all worked.

Game by game… Playable Demo was controlled by a young mark in the first row, who flashed through the main storyline and even uncovered one of the bonus secrets. Very happy there. Then Flying Dudes. Flying Dudes worked. Muttley has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the reason he was placed on earth was to make it possible for a pair of audience members to fly some dudes around the stage, and Mick’s music feels utterly like the ice planet mission from Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries. So much joy.

Poison and Switch was rad, easily the best players we’ve ever had for that. The lady controlling me was methodical and patient, but cruel whent the opportunity permitted. The guy controlling Jack blustered too early and Jack ended up guzzling a bunch of poison. When I took the control device from my controller at the end of the game I told her that she was ‘an infallible strategist’, and she nodded in acknowledgment.

Chicken was lovely - a good result from a crafty crowd. These guys have already set some high benchmark scores which I think it will be hard for the rest of the season to beat. But we’ll see.

I’m extremely satisfied with all this. It’s a pleasant day when you realise your theatre production is the live equivalent of a 3.5′ floppy demo disk from a 1992 computer game magazine. All you animals, come and see the show if you like (a) good things, or (b) flying dudes. It’s on at 8pm until this Saturday 21st at the Street Theatre, tickets 6247 1223. Rockit.

A Prisoner’s Dilemma at The Street Theatre

On Tuesday June 3rd 2008, Bohemian Productions gave the first public performance of its show A Prisoner’s Dilemma since the 2007 Australasian Complex Systems Conference, at Melrose High in the ACT. Since its last outing, Boho has been funded through the Foundation for Young Australians’ Spark Fund to revise and edit the show, including constructing entirely new set, props and costumes. The Street Theatre’s Gillian Schwab has created a visually striking set, which is nevertheless flexible enough to be folded up and carried behind your ear.

As part of our Spark Grant Funding, Bohemian has undertaken a free schools tour to ACT High Schools and Colleges from June 3 – 13, which began with a Year 10 class at Melrose High. It was a really fun show – we had a really switched on and engaged audience. The students scored extremely highly on the opening Coin Game, significantly less well on Chicken, and unravelled the puzzles in Playable Demo like seasoned detectives. All in all, it was an excellent performance to kick off the year with.

we are handsome fellows when it is too dark to see us. photo by ‘pling.

For those familiar with the work: we have created two new interactive modules for our 2008 shows. The first new module, Poison and Switch, made its debut on Tuesday 3rd at Melrose High. The second will have its first public premiere on Tuesday 17 June when A Prisoner’s Dilemma opens at the Street Theatre. The show will run for one week, 8pm from Tuesday – Saturday 17 – 21 June, at the Street Theatre on Childers Street. Tickets through the Street Theatre: (02) 6247 1223 or www.thestreet.org.au

Once the Street season is complete, we’ll have a couple of weeks off to go back to being human beings, and then we take the show on an aeroplane ride to Brisbane, where A Prisoner’s Dilemma will feature as part of the Brisbane Festival’s under the radar initiative, at the Metro Theatre from June 25 – 27.

photo by ‘pling

Also, I managed to completely trip over the Melrose High Drama Room stage at the end of Playable Demo yesterday, and landed head-first on the carpet with my legs stretched vertically and a bucket full of props emptying torches, metal gel-frames and a sock full of antique pennies on to my face. The girl sitting nearest the wall gave me a long look to make absolutely certain it wasn’t a brilliantly choreographed part of the play, and then realised that there is no way I am capable of such a feat. And then did her best not to burst out laughing at me while I picked myself up. Good times.

Dat Politics, Max Tundra and the Prom Night Wager

And so I have added two more pieces to my collectiate of Tigerbeat6 fan-fiction: a short fragment following Kevin Blechdom’s footsteps the day after a riot, and the beginnings of a delightfully High School romantic comedy entitled Dat Politics, Max Tundra and the Prom Night Wager.

Why am I writing a series of short stories featuring musicians on Kid 606’s Tigerbeat6 label? Partly out of a selfless urge to help construct a mythology for a record label packed full of worthy musicians who deserve as much incoherent prose written about their exploits as Hillary Duff or the Backstreet Boys, and partly because it just feels right. I am fully aware (and you should be too) that Dat Politics and Max Tundra look like this:

.
Dat Politics and Max Tundra each have official websites

and nevertheless when I try to write about them, they come out like this:

Tundra is driving Politics home from school in his beat up old car.

Politics: I bet I can turn Alexis Cobweb from geek dream to prom queen in one week.
Tundra: I bet you can too.
Politics: We can’t both bet the same thing.
Tundra: We both agree that you can turn Alexis into the prom queen. But I bet you can’t stop her from setting fire to something on prom night.

Read more…

Tigerbeat fanfic

So, Tigerbeat6 Records. Formed and run by gentleman musician Kid 606, whose output stretches back into the shallower depths of the 20th century. Mr 606 is by and large an ‘Electronic Musician’, although his particular co-ordinates in the Electricity / Music universe have sometimes been referred to as ‘Glitch’.For those not in the know, ‘Glitch’ is the musical sub-genre which is the most pleasant to get your mouth around. The ‘Gl’ at the beginning has that lovely glottl swallowing feeling, and the ‘itch’ pulls your face into this toothy sneer which is the ideal expression for listening to the music. An example of the form:

From ID Software’s Doom. Some smarmy chump has turned on the No-Clippings cheat (IDSPISPOPD) and walked through the walls right off the edge of the level.

Since 2000, Tigerbeat has assembled an eclectic roster of electronic and experimental musicians / deviants. Research has demonstrated that Tigerbeat6 is now responsible for an astonishing 11% of all the music available on the market today. And yet despite this colossal success, there is a gaping hole in the Tigerbeat propaganda machinery: Tigerbeat fan-fiction is virtually non-existent. You can literally find more fan-fiction featuring Jeff Goldblum than featuring any Tigerbeat6 artist.

It is clear that something significant is amiss, but now is not the time to start pointing fingers. Our first concern must be to PLUG THAT HOLE. Only when an acceptable percentage of pages on the World Wide Web feature the imagined exploits of Tigerbeat-signed musicians (55-60%) can we stop and ask what went wrong. For now, our task is to post all the Tigerbeat fan-fiction we can.

In that spirit, I have posted a small library of samples from my various Tigerbeat novels. Please feel free to provide your own contributions, or if you happen to be a Tigerbeat artist, to commission a tale depicting you in an especially positive light.

seriously this is just a simple though somewhat misdirected nod of respect to some musicians I respect and admire.